Teen Devotions

Jose Lima began his professional baseball career as a 19-year-old pitcher and starred as a pitcher for the Houston Astros for several years in the late 1990s. Jose was an outgoing, energetic, likable young ballplayer who usually had a positive outlook on life and his career.

BUT when the Astros built their new ball park known as "Minute Maid Park" Jose became upset. The problem? The left-field fence has one of the shortest distances from home plate to the left-field fence in major league baseball. The hitters love it...the pitchers hate it. It was tougher on pitchers, especially when they faced right-handed batters who tended to hit the ball to left field.

The first time Jose stepped onto the new diamond...he looked into the outfield and noticed the close proximity of the left-field fence. He said, "I'll never be able to pitch in here."

Sure enough, despite the excitement of playing in a new ball field...Jose had the worst year of his career. He plummeted from being a twenty-game winner to being a sixteen-game loser. Never in the history of the Astros had any pitcher experienced such a negative turn-around.

WHAT HAPPENED TO JOSE? The same thing that happens to many of us every day...we get what we say! Our words become self-fulfilling prophecies. IF you allow your thoughts to defeat you and they give birth to negative ideas through what you say, YOUR ACTIONS WILL FOLLOW. Thoughts and WORDS have tremendous power and if you want to or not...we give actions and life to what we say...good or bad!

"As water reflects a face, so a man's heart reflects the man" (Proverbs 27:19).